Self Distraction

Self Distraction

Know when you need help

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When the Wright brothers made their historic first flight in 1903, lots of other inventors were trying to fling their own shoddy little planes into the air. And in 1977, when Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs unveiled the Apple II, there were a zillion other nerds working on building a personal computer.

But Woz beat them to it, and Jobs knew how to sell it.

The Apple II was the product that turned Apple into Apple. It was the iPhone of its era, the product that redefined every machine like it that came afterward.

Its real magic was Wozniak’s minimalism. He integrated many technologies and components that no one else had put together in the same device, and he did it with as few parts as possible. It was, as Wozniak wrote in his autobiography, “the first low-cost computer which, out of the box, you didn’t have to be a geek to use.”

But as genius as Wozniak was, the Apple II almost didn’t make it out of his brain and into a product that the rest of the world could use.

Apple’s first employee: The remarkable odyssey of Bill Fernandez – Feature – TechRepublic

Read the full piece.

Quickie: Apple offering 0% finance again

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I don’t like debt but two years ago I bought my office iMac throughly Apple’s finance deal because it was 0% and I decided I would rather the money stay in my account than theirs. I was still glad when the monthly payments were over but it was a handy thing for my business.

Handy enough that I did look into it again when the iPhone 6 came out. This 0% finance deal wasn’t available then – but it is now.

It may have been for some time: I just had a notion it might be there as a certain big holiday is coming. And yep, there it is. The cost of Apple gear with this is significantly lower than with typical finance options from Apple and others.

Talk to your phone and have it whisper back one task at a time

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I was going to point this Harvard Business Review article out to you because it’s about using your phone to capture all those stray thoughts you have. I do this constantly. Especially when driving, I will now many, many, many times per drive say aloud “Hey, Siri, remind me to…”. Sometimes I’ll tell it to remind me at a certain time or a certain place. And I knew I wasn’t alone in this but I wanted you to hear someone else saying it, hence:

Throughout the day, I tell my phone to “remind me to follow up with Sarah about the Warren account next Tuesday morning,” “remind me to pack my phone charger when I get home,” or even “remind me to buy gum tonight at 9.” Yes, I come in for a certain amount of mockery (as when a friend overheard me dictating that gum reminder), but I’d rather be mocked for my voice dictation than for my tendency to forget commitments.

Conquer Your To-Do List with Your Phone – Alexandra Samuel, Harvard Business Review (1 December 2014)

However, Samuel makes a hell of a good point that I had not thought of.

Creating reminders on your phone also means that you’ll be triggered to act on the tasks you’ve captured at a certain time, wherever you are. I’ve never been diligent about reviewing to-do lists, largely because they quickly get so daunting that I can’t bear to look at them. Instead, I now rely on reminders that feed me one thing at a time – instead of facing the long list of everything I have on my plate.

She’s right, isn’t she? Read the full piece.

The end of sitting on your end

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Shudder. Shudder. Shudder.

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The research reads like a Surgeon General’s warning: Prolonged periods of sitting can lead to obesity, heart disease, blood clots and spinal compression, according to the latest medical studies.

To combat this modern office horror, an artist and an architecture firm from the Netherlands have re-imagined the office with all the chairs pulled out from under us. The exhibit, called The End of Sitting, is a geometric landscape of surfaces of varying heights on which to lean.

Standing room only: Startup office of the future promises ‘end of sitting’ – David Pierini, Cult of Mac (3 December 2014)

Read the full piece where that photo comes from too.

How file formats matter

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This is an article about many of the file formats we are familiar, from HTML to Photoshop, but what interests me is this about word processors:

WordPerfect was always the best word processor. Because it allowed for insight into its very structure. You could hit a certain key combination and suddenly the screen would split and you’d reveal the codes, the bolds and italics and so forth, that would define your text when it was printed. It was beloved of legal secretaries and journalists alike. Because when you work with words, at the practical, everyday level, the ability to look under the hood is essential. Words are not simple. And WordPerfect acknowledged that. Microsoft Word did not. Microsoft kept insisting that what you saw on your screen was the way things were, and if your fonts just kept sort of randomly changing, well, you must have wanted it that way.

On File Formats, Very Briefly, by Paul Ford · The Manual

I could be wrong, of course, but it always seemed to me that WordPerfect was developed by writers and Microsoft Word by engineers. For all that I admire engineers, in this case I think they did a poor job. In WordPerfect, a document is stored in sequence, paragraph by paragraph, fine. In Word, every single paragraph is like a separate document with lots of pointers back and forth to others. It’s like the paragraphs in a Word document are all free-flowing, free-standing and only happen to line up the way you want.

Maybe I’m just too into this stuff, but if you are too, then do read the full piece.

Contact has been made

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Or rather contacts, plural. I hate the word contacts: it’s like networking. I relish meeting people and having a natter but that’s nattering and meeting people: it isn’t networking my contacts.

But.

It is weird how your work changes, isn’t it? In this last year I’ve turned from being locked to my desk to barely being at it. Neither is great: both are problematic. But being away a lot comes from working with a lot of people and I am forced to change my mind about how bad my memory is: I’ve had some awful moments when I’ve gone blank but generally I’m far better at names than I thought. Or maybe it’s just that everyone I meet is so distinctive. They are, but maybe that’s how I’m getting better.

Nonetheless, I’ve been prompted into looking into a way of keeping track of everyone I’m talking with: I can’t promise someone something and then not deliver, I can’t. And earlier this week, the makers of BusyCal released a public beta of BusyContacts which has set me off down a wormhole of looking into this subject.

BusyCal is the calendar app made by the makers of once-powerful and actually just once-existing Now Up to Date which I loved and adored and cherished in the 1990s. Back then they had a companion application called Now Contact. It was so much a companion that the two were just always sold together as Now Up-to-Date and Contact.

Fast forward all these years and the company is doing very well with its BusyCal product but I don’t happen to like it. Purely for aesthetic reasons, it just doesn’t do it for me and since you spend a lot of time staring at this stuff, that matters. I went with Fantastical instead and am happy with it.

But somehow I ended up on the public beta list for BusyContacts. I must’ve registered – and you can do that yourself right here – but so long ago that I don’t recall. Anyhow, a beta copy came my way this week and… I’m not very keen on the aesthetics. Fair enough, really.

But it is interesting. Chiefly for this reason: when you look up someone in your contacts list, BusyContacts shows you the text of the last email exchange you had and a clickable list of all the email contact you’ve had. I adore this. Adore it.

Have spent the week trying to get it on an app that a) I like the look of better and 2) works on my iPhone and iPad.

Tried and failed.

I think I’m going to have to buy BusyContacts when it comes out. But I’d still like it look better. And I still want a way to get this feature on my phone.

Plus, I’ve just discovered hundreds of email addresses that I use all the time that are not in my Contacts. They’re in my previous recipients list. Who knew? Working to get those out.

Yeah, yeah, put the phone down, all that

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Unconvinced.

I was a mobile junkie. The phosphorescent glow left me mesmerized and needing more. Each Snapchat or push notification fueled my need for news, updates, and winning the battle against boredom. At my worst, most conversations with friends and family would start with “do you have a charger?”

I remember the turning point. I had just returned from a camping trip where I ‘witnessed’ a beautiful sunset. As I was reminiscing over the dozens of photos I took, I barely had any recollection of ACTUALLY being there. I was so focused on eternalizing the moment through my phone, that I hadn’t taken the time to eternalize it in my brain. I accepted my addiction and decided to make a change.

This is your brain on mobile — Jeremy Vanderhey, Medium (10 August 2014)

Read the full piece.

I’m listening. The case for a comfy chair

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By reserving his desk for work, and his comfy chair for leisure, Jack was able to create a new habit. Knowing that, should he want to check his emails or Twitter, he’d have to move across the room, gave Jack that little push he needed to stay at his desk a bit longer and get things done.

Workplace Hack: The Distraction Chair – Kylie Whitehead, Contactzilla (26 November 2014)

Read the full piece.

Five habits that hurt your productivity

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This is a Globe and Mail article that I think sounds shocked at the stunning idea that multitasking could be rubbish. Ignore that and see this as a refresher and I think it’s useful.

Entrepreneurs are expected to do everything and be everything at all times. It’s part of business, especially when you’re first starting out.

However, there are some seemingly productive habits that you may have formed that are actually killing your success in the long term. The candle that burns brightest, burns fastest, and while it’s crucial for you to be productive with your time, you also need to focus on not burning out.

You’re actually hurting your business with these five ‘productive’ habits – The Globe and Mail

Read the full piece.